Hello Everyone,
At the start of the pandemic nearly all of our staff was laid off and as a result many non-critical tasks like reviewing new records and merging constituents fell by the way side. So... two years later we have around 60,000-120,000 new records and over 3,000 merges to complete. In the past we delegated data clean up and merging to the box office, but due to continuing staffing shortages we'll need to find another way.
Does anyone have experience using automated procedures to clean up data and schedule merges. Is this possible? We'd like to add CSIs to new records with invalid or missing addresses. I vaguely remember reading a forum post a while back about some tessitura organizations who outsourced data clean up and merges. I can't seem to find that post again. Has anybody tried this? Anyways, I'd love to hear what you all do and discuss the best ways to insure clean consistent data.
Thank you,
Joseph
We all are showing signs of a condition I call the "fear of the 'one way' merge".
This is sadly often a trauma many CRM managers have, not just on Tessitura but other name brand CRMs like SalesForce as well.
Tom Brown (Past Member) said:We all are showing signs of a condition I call the "fear of the one way merge".
This is sad. Of course, merges aren't irreversible, with access to SSMS.
It would be great if the network created an un-merge utility, though I can easily imagine why they don't.
Really? In 2019 I contacted support about an accidental merge and got the below response:
Once constituents have been merged, there is no standard process to unmerge constituent records. If the records haven't been merged in your test system, you could use that as a guide to reassign the constituent data.
Any orders which can be determined to belong to the constituent deleted in error can be changed to the correct customer_no by opening the order within Tessitura and changing the constituent ID for the order. The system will prompt that you are changing the owner of the orders, which you can accept.
Kanani Reichlin said:Once constituents have been merged, there is no standard process to unmerge constituent records.
Note the "standard". Yes, there is no standard way to un-merge records, i.e. in the client, using client tools. If you are able to access your data via SSMS, though, you can do un-merges there, via SQL.
You basically have to set the "delete" constituent back to "active", and then reverse the steps taken by AP_MERGE_CUSTOMER, plus any custom tables you might update via LP_CONST_MERGE. It's not rocket science, but it can be fiddly and time consuming, depending on how complex the two merged records were.
Years ago a query about un-merges sent to support would get this kind of, "you can do it, but you're kind of on your own" response. It's sad to see that they just say, "you can't do it" more recently.